RITUAL SHIVA TIGER POT 3000BC PROTO RAVI INDUS CULTURE MEHRGAHR ARCHAEOLOGY RARE

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RITUAL SHIVA TIGER POT 3000BC PROTO RAVI INDUS CULTURE MEHRGAHR ARCHAEOLOGY RARE:
$2502.50

TIGER-DECORATED PROTO-INDUS CULTURE

SHIVA RITUAL OFFERING POT

Made in MEHRGAHR (BALUCHISTAN / BALOCHISTAN, PAKISTAN) on the Ravi river.

Circa 3000 BC Archaeology

ANCIENT WRITING INDUS SCRIPT

GLOBULAR POT (10 cmwide x 8 cm high).

This globular ritual offering pot is clearly early in the Indus pottery phase, decoratedbyone of themost primitive forms of writing. The square, structurednature of the characters seen written upon this pot\'s surfaceare distinctive from thoseon later Indus ceramics, whichwere presented as more wavy and decorative, therefore being less certain tointerpretas writing. Yet here the \"squareness\" of the variant characters (see photo of writing translation) proves this obviously to be ancient writing. The ancient Indus Script has not yet been fully deciphered, yet the example here does provide ampleevidence that a composition of individual phonetic characters were combined in the written lettersto form more complex expressions ofwords and names. In this case, the writing upon this potis a magical invocation forprotection from the Moon, as guardian of the Earth, while tigers were used to invoke protection against evil. Thereis an indication of purification through cooking, which suggests this is tocelebrate the ritual offering, by cooking, of two tigers. There is no visible evidence of liquid (or other) remains within the pot, sothis usage is conjectural, although one might expect that it was used to pour libations during a ritual ceremony.

In ancient India and Pakistan, over the course of the year several important festivals were marked by the priesthoods. These festivals or ceremonies were called \"Yajnas\" (sacrificed offerings), and the first seven in any given year were called \"pakayajnas\" (cooked sacrificed offerings). This is therefore a \"Pakayajna pot\", likely to have been made to celebrate the ritual slaying of two tigers in order to give protection to the Earth. On the pot, we can see three lines leading from the tiger\'s neck to the base of the Acacia Tree (symbol of the Tree of Life) so that its blood has been given to Creation.

The tiger was most closely associated with the Hindu deity SHIVA, who was protected by the light of the Moon. In the ancient Indus culture this deity was called SHASHI in its proto-form and the \"m-shaped\" letterin Tamil script (3rd century BC) expresses \"SS\" = \"Sha-shi\". The two most common letters, as \"O\" and \"M\",are also a veryobvious pictorialsuggestion of the\"OM\",used in priestly chanting to invoke SHIVA / SHASHI. This blue-skinned deity is usually represented asbeing seated upon atiger\'s skin, with his dark skin turned blue by the effect ofmoonlight, so he had a strongassociation with both the tiger and the Moon, which are the themes portrayed upon this pot.

It has been found that some ancient writing, in Egypt and Sumeria for instance, conveys more than one meaning at once. In this case, we can see the pictorially represented \"OM\", the \"Shashi\" isalso intuitive, once we know that the later Tamil script used this same characterthen to express \"Sha-sha\" /\"Sha-shi\" = \"Shiva\". Theproto-Indus (or Ravi) culture also fused individual letters with others to form words, aswe find here. We cannot call these compositional letters mere decoration, since they are not pretty, but are instead practically placed in the form of a ritual invocation which was made ceremoniously. Indeed, one character is seen to be squashed into its place and so mis-shapen, proving that this is writing and not mere artistic decoration, otherwise it would have been more aesthetically executed. One only squeezes writing into a tight space because it forms or completes a specific expression, in this case a ritual chant or invocation for the Moon\'s (Chandra\'s) protection of the Earth (Shiva), for which a cooked offering has been made of two great tigers.

The unusual forms seen upon on this globular pot certainly are tigers, despite the head not beingclassically tiger-like. Yet this similar formisseen painted upon other contemporary ceramics, with the familiar short head, the cross-patterning on the body and the stripe-like patterning at the neck, as well as the tiger\'s feet and tail. In the Indus cultural artthe tiger was used as an emblem to spiritually guard the good against the forces of evil, rather as the Chinese used dragons. As to whether two physical tigers were actually sacrificed to invoke protection on Earth, well that is a matter for sound conjecture; yet that these tigerswere invoked to protect Shiva and the Earth, of that we may be more certain.

The city of Mehrgahr was excavated between 1974-86 by a French archaeological team led by husband and wife Jean-Francois and Catherine Jarrige.This pot came out of their collection, accrued over their years of digging at the site. It is not knownif the damage to the pot\'s rim was caused during the excavation or more anciently.

On the banks of the Ravi river, the city of Mehrgahr was occupied from around 6500 BC, being one of the oldest known such city cultures in the world. Its people began firing clay pottery around 4000 BC and making ceramic objects from around 3500 BC. The city was occupied until circa 2600 BC, then abandoned due to drought, whenits population moved eastwards to Harrapa and Mohenjo-Daro, on the banks of the Indus river. Since this pot is clearly early in the cultural sequence, with the letters being of a proto, non-decorative type, it can conservatively be placed at 3000 BC, making this remarkable artefactaround 5000 years old. The writing upon it is therefore among the oldest examples in the known world. Indus Valley philologists have mainly concerned themselves with seals in translating the script, largely because in the passing ofcenturiesthe old ritualised writing had devolved by then to a more decorative, representational ritual art-form. For instance, the approximate \"O\" and \"M\" forms that are seen on this potsoonintime became a flower-lined circle and a wavy-looking \"M\",taken by archaeologists as mere artistic decoration, withsome possible symbolic meaning only. Instead, the truth is that they are the remnant form of a more ancient writing of the proto-Indus (Ravi) culture, which is seen here. It isa form of writing capable of three simultaneous levels of expression, being at once pictorial (OM), symbolic (Shiva)while also being a phonetically-composed written language predating the Phoenician and Hebrew phonetic scripts by some 1500 years.

Whether my own translation of the script upon this pot is entirely correct is less importantthan the simple fact that this is the form of the most ancient writing of the Indus culture, on a pot whichissecurely dated to circa 3000 BC. The presence of 26 written Indus script characters upon this pot means that it records the mostamount of charactersseen upon any object in the world.

This pot waspurchased froma qualifiedarchaeologistworkingfora USdealer in ancient art, who provideda certificate assertinga date of EBA 3000-2500 BCthat was methodologically arrived at. From the type of pottery and style of decoration it is clear this potwas made at Mehrgahr, withits distinctive Mehrgahr terracotta red colouring.This alonemeans that it cannot date to later than 2600 BC, when the city was abandoned due to drought.Yet there are many other contemporary and later finds which have been madein the area bearing similar styled tiger decorations, so this is clearly a Mehrgahr-culture pot.It is also certain to beearly in its cultural sequence -since clearly the priestly finesse of writing was later on lost or misplaced some time after this pot was made, continuing on in a merely decorative manner,even though the culture itself still thrived on.It is intuitivethat it had been a priestly responsibility to mark such ritual invocations and writings, andsurely all such knowledge of the earliest written communication was confined to the scribal class or school.It is indicated that this class later suffered a decline, whereupon much of their knowledge was lost, possiblycaused bythe onslaught of the drought itself.

The priests of the proto-Indus culture were likely to have adorned themselves in similar manner to those of contemporary Sumeria, with whom there was clear trade contact, asrevealedby the many seals. Hence the picture included here ofa 3rd millennium BC Sumerian priest may serve as a realisticillustration of the manwho adorned this pot circa 3000 BC.